Solfège

Laurent Le Guernec didn’t turn his childhood dream into a career but is still very passionate when he speaks about music and piano. He explains about the importance of studying GC (gas chromatography) at an early stage, “We tend to think learning GC is not important, but it’s like practicing solfège, it’s one of the basics.”

Ahaa I see, it sounds quite boring but seems as important as practicing to throw jabs and one-twos millions of times. In boxing the rule is simple: keep your feet and hands busy, or you ain’t gonna survive.

Related

4 Comments

This made me think of practicing tendu (a very simple extended movement, on which everything in ballet is based)–you do hundreds of them everyday. My ballet teacher would say, “the moment you think tendu is not important is the moment you should forget about ballet career.” At one point, I discovered that the practice had a meditative component, and even now, I always start my day with this routine.

Victoria,
“I always start my day with this routine,” I like that! It also reminds me the fact that doing shadow boxing alone in a ring when no one’s around has a meditative quality to it.
I think both classic piano and ballet are less likely to be influenced by technologies than perfumery, and in that sense, perfumery seems to be closer to sculpture. I learnt how to make my chisels before learning how to carve a piece of stone or wood. No one learns to sculpt that way any more. Or to look at it differently, your mind needs to be open to new methods and materials if you want your work to be in contemporary art. To be creative requires to be open minded, and it becomes more difficult as you get older;)

I find it incredible to see how the great masters of ballet (Balanchine comes to mind) have stretched the concept of what is possible for a human body and what is acceptable. Balanchine had dancers exaggerate the movements, maintain angular quality of classical forms (a big no-no in classical ballet) and even perform masculine variations en pointe. So, I definitely agree that a mind needs to be open to new methods and materials (in case of ballet, forms, movements) in order to create an artwork that is innovative.

I also think that the big aspect of creativity is the willingness to take risk. Sometimes one simply does not know what venturing onto a new terrain might lead to–one might perform a dazzling feat or fall on one’s face. Same with perfume, a novel accord can be breakthrough or a complete flop. The desire to try and the lack of fear to do so are very important.

I completely agree. No one can overstate the importance of what George Balanchine has done.
Now if we look at ballet or visual art we can roughly divide the history into “classic,” “modern,” and “contemporary” periods. Same thing may not be applied to other form of art, but in my opinion perfumery hasn’t even entered the modern period yet. There are perfumers we can compare to Balachine, Picasso or Brancusi, but these important perfumers’ names and accomplishments are not really known. Perfumery will continue to evolve differently, but I feel we need someone like Diaghilev to emerge in the world of perfumery. Then we’ll meet the Nijinsky of perfumery and can enjoy a lot of gossips, too:D